MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - ~sniff~ It's like home ~sniff~ <nt>

> So I have (had) pigeons and other birds that I thought were roosting in vents and the
> soffits in the front of my house. After procrastinating for a long while, I finally
> had exterminators come out last week to deal with it. They got rid of birds and nests
> and buttoned everything up. That night, I can still hear movement in my walls and
> ceilings. The guys came back the next day, re-checked all of their work and can't
> find anything. Finally, they ask if they can take a look in the crawlspace above my
> condo. It turns out the birds were getting right inside the crawlspace, and the whole
> thing has basically been a pigeon coop for years. 10 or so birds stuck inside, nests,
> eggs, chicks, and about 3 inches of pigeon shit covering everything. They install
> one-way pipes to get the remaining birds out and they come back today to pull on
> hazmat suits and go up there to scrape up all of the mess.
>
> So the guys show up and start setting up. One of them slips while he's up there and
> punches out a two foot section of my bathroom ceiling. They cleaned up the mess and
> taped up the hole, but in the meantime I've got plaster and pigeon shit raining down
> on my toothbrush and everything else in the bathroom. After about four hours, the
> guys come down and tell me they have to quit because it's now too hot in the attic to
> function, and they're only about 1/3 done with the job. My hope had been to wash my
> hands of this mess today, and now it looks like it'll be one or probably two more
> sessions, plus a plaster guy coming to fix the ceiling.
>
> Meanwhile, I'm trying to work from home through all of this, and the babies (13 mos.)
> are just fit to be tied all day. I finish up work while my wife gives them dinner,
> then we all pile in the car to get ice cream and just get out of the house for a
> while. That goes OK, but when we get home, my wife suddenly realizes that nobody's
> seen the cat in hours and his dinner is untouched, which means he's either missing or
> dead. We start searching the house and find nothing. Our best guess at that point is
> that the cat snuck out while the exterminators were coming in and out. My wife starts
> freaking out, the babies start shrieking because it's now past their bedtime, and I'm
> yelling at everyone to calm down and shut up. Finally, I convince my wife to put the
> kids to bed, while I hit the streets and try to find him. I crisscross back and forth
> all over the neighborhood and turn up nothing. In the meantime, my wife's called her
> brother over to help search and she's blowing up the local Twittersphere. I come in
> to get a flashlight and continue the search now that it's dark. On a hunch, I make
> one more pass through the basement with the flashlight (I'd already been through
> there twice). Sure enough, there he is huddled behind the downstairs apartment's air
> handler, staring at me with big saucer eyes.
>
> So in the end, everyone is safe and everything mostly worked out, but holy crap am I
> exhausted.